The Minnesota Legislature adjourned the 2018 session just before midnight Sunday, and Governor Mark Dayton said earlier in the evening about a tax bill and a budget bill lawmakers passed, “If they come to me the way they are now, I’ll veto them.” Dayton says there isn’t enough funding for school districts’ emergency budget needs. House Speaker Kurt Daudt responds, “He asked for 130 million. We gave him 225 million in that bill, so we have more the exceeded what he asked for.” Dayton fires back most of that is re-purposing money that schools already have for other things. “It’s not new money,” he says. “They’re just taking money from… two pots and putting it into another one.”
Republican Representative Greg Davids from Preston says, “If he [Dayton] doesn’t sign the bill for sure immediately 300-thousand Minnesotans are gonna have tax increases [because state tax laws won’t match up with federal changes]. If he signs the bill, 98.8 percent are held harmless.”
But Senate Democratic Minority Leader Tom Bakk calls the tax bill a “huge giveaway” to big multi-national corporations. Bakk says they’re “bringing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of profits into this state, who don’t want to be taxed on it.”